What Would/Has Made You Quit The Game?

[zugschef]

So now they can cast two spells that each end the encounter per round, rather than just the one needed?

you don't end every encounter with just one spell. but now you can set up your defense and the offense in just one turn.

[veekie]

Or if your techniques allow saves at some point, you can introduce them to the concept of "lose even if you save" by stacking the lesser effects of a passed save on a twofer.

[Kasz]

So now they can cast two spells that each end the encounter per round, rather than just the one needed?

You could also combine the extra standard action with...

+1. Doubling the amount of spells you can cast in a given timeframe is easily the biggest buff you can give to a caster (and the reason Belt of Battle, Celerity and Arcane Spellsurge are so well regarded).

...and cast three spells with relative ease. Even with two spells as standard, combinations such as stone to mud on the ceiling -> mud to stone  on the mud that falls onto the enemies become available as standard. With a belt of battle you could do stone to mud again on another group of enemy's ceiling and then a quickened mud to stone to total four spells cast with just using 1 quite common item and a quicken. This could easily end an encounter if the enemies are huddled close or even if two groups attack from either side.

Direct damage is pretty weaksauce but how about three wings of flurry from the Sorcerer with a belt of battle?

[snakeman830]

So now they can cast two spells that each end the encounter per round, rather than just the one needed?

You could also combine the extra standard action with...

+1. Doubling the amount of spells you can cast in a given timeframe is easily the biggest buff you can give to a caster (and the reason Belt of Battle, Celerity and Arcane Spellsurge are so well regarded).

...and cast three spells with relative ease. Even with two spells as standard, combinations such as stone to mud on the ceiling -> mud to stone  on the mud that falls onto the enemies become available as standard. With a belt of battle you could do stone to mud again on another group of enemy's ceiling and then a quickened mud to stone to total four spells cast with just using 1 quite common item and a quicken. This could easily end an encounter if the enemies are huddled close or even if two groups attack from either side.

Direct damage is pretty weaksauce but how about three wings of flurry from the Sorcerer with a belt of battle?

Quickened spells and Belt of Battle are both Swift actions.  You still only get 1 per turn.

[zook1shoe]

just go with a Tauric Paragon Phynxkin-Were-Paragon Tiny Monstrous Centipede-Were-Paragon Ibis Strongheart Halfling for 3 extra quickened spells and only +8.5 ECL

if only there wasn't that stupid requirement of 9th-level spells

[brujon]

Play a Choker... Get two standard actions. Become immune to daze, grab celerity... Breaking the action economy is easyy!! And a bannable offense if it isn't agreed on beforehand...

[zook1shoe]

Does the choker have a LA somewhere?

[Ananse]

The choker has an LA of "-" in Monster Manual I.

Anecdotes spoilered for length.

1)

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White Wolf. Werewolf plus assorted supernaturals. Highly detailed setting with an elaborate plot, detailed NPCs and a dedicated GM -- me. The story was epic and dynamic, ready to adapt to anything the PCs could throw at it and build upon the narrative they provided. I am typically ridiculously prepared, and this was my magnum opus. The PCs are thrust into a quickly-spiraling nightmare of increasingly horrible events that will demand every atom of their skill and perseverance to survive or save, and they will likely have to choose between the two. The PCs take the measure of the challenge, I crack my knuckles in anticipation, and --

-- the PCs call for help.

I. . . had forgotten that they could do that.

I had covered so many detailed scenarios, ironed out so many nuanced options, that the most obvious and sensible decision one could make totally escaped me. Forest for the trees and all that.

In my -- meager -- defense, my previous game had been with terrible, violent, kill-everything gamers that refused to roleplay anything. The switch to comparably well-adjusted human beings probably threw me. This is the problem with playing with people who are intelligent and self-possessed.

I had created such a complex web of NPCs that it was child's play for the PCs to get the interested parties all on the same page.

I was taken aback by my own foolishness, but I rolled with it. If their feedback was honest, I gave them a good game, at the expense of a headache and stimulant abuse.

And there were casualties. Those detailed NPCs? I had to slaughter nearly all of them in order to give the PCs a challenge. The first adventure single-handedly wiped the board of the bulk of the political structure I had made for the campaign.

I quietly put the campaign on hold after that.

2)

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2nd ed D&D: Planescape. The game started four minutes ago. We, the PCs, need to get into a palace. The guards don't want to let us in. There is an entrance unguarded by anyone except dogs.

Earlier: after several long discussions about prestidigitation, the DM describes what it does as "anything that's not useful." We point out that makes no sense since cleaning your clothes and entertaining children is "useful." He concedes the point -- ostensibly.

I use prestidigitation to create the smell of steak wafts in towards the dogs. The dogs react. The DM actually describes the dogs moving off towards the smell -- until he realizes, due to the PCs jumping a fence onto the palace grounds, that this would help us. He then reverses the ruling and holds that the dogs rush us since prestidigitation can't do "useful" things. All players involved (including the DM) were either studying and/or working in a hard science field; this incoherent definition was deeply offensive. We ended the entire campaign there. That's 4+ hours character creation, 2+ hours argument, and 4 minutes of campaign. The DM was honestly shocked. A fellow player stated: "If I wanted to be disrespected, I'd go to work." I concurred and do still.

3)

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Space opera, with as much hard-sf as you can throw in without losing the space opera scale. PCs are on a spaceship. We're probably pirates. I don't know and I don't care. Why? Because we're a walking clusterphuq of ridiculous backstories that are about to trainwreck into sheer insanity:

• Ship's doctor is a sentient parasite/symbiote from a race outside of the xenophobic empire of the setting, sent into the empire to spy upon it, while living in a series of cloned bodies. Note: given its ethics, this character is the most benign member of the party.

• The captain is a pirate and frequently works as an espionage agent for said empire and its enemies.

• The first officer is actually a sentient microbial disease that takes over sentient hosts and is acting as a vanguard to take over all intelligent life in the empire.

• The navigator -- um, the first thing she did in the campaign was pose as a prostitute so she could rob someone in a spaceport, leaving him naked and tied to a bed. No explanation was given.

• One of the passengers was a telepathic catgirl. Telepathy is illegal. Her characteristics include impulsiveness, co-dependent behavior, compulsive telepathic reading, and gossiping about everything she has learned. Usually telepathically. In large crowds.

• The other passenger was Crystal Dragon Space Jesus. A crystalline, draconic, messiah-figure, worshipped by many. Also, being a Crystal Dragon is illegal. It's probably illegal to be Space Jesus, too, at this point I'm tittering like a maniac and can't even ask the GM a coherent question so I'll never know.

I'm adoring this. This predates the invention of the term "Xanatos pileup," but this is nevertheless why the phrase exists. Nearly all of the players were giggling in anticipation of finally meeting each other in-game.

And meeting each other was the sticking point.

The GM was obsessed with how cool his autocratic, repressive space empire was and the first adventure was spent exploring the imperial bureaucracy. I have no idea what happens when secret-sentient-parasite tangles with secret-microbial-horror over access to the followers of Cosmic Christ, but I do know, to this day, the nuances of customs checkpoint management in a completely made-up government. I do not know what a psychotic criminal who gets a mind-reading furry pet and access to sensitive information concerning government agents on multiple sides of a ruthless intergalactic cold war does as her opening move, but I can tell you that one of of those governments has exquisite and exacting docking regulations that require extensive negotiations with low-level functionaries before one can park one's goddurm ship at the goddurm spaceport where the goddurm adventure is supposed to start.

The PCs were in the same place at the same time for the first time during the last two minutes of a several-hour session.

He was mystified when no one showed up to Game Two.

We players felt like a neglected spouse: we were back from the spa and were wearing our sexiest negligee, but all our GM wanted to do was drink a beer and watch SportsCenter.

[nijineko]

spoiler 1 - why on hold? power abhors a vacuum. someone is going to fill in the gap. let the pcs try to fill the gap, or deal with the chaos they just caused.

spoiler 2 - heh. silly dm.

spoiler 3 - looks like the dm couldn't see past their own creation.

[Shadowknight12]

Usually, I tend to leave quietly when I realise my playstyle doesn't gel with the DM's. Why fight about it, when it's better to let everyone else have fun in peace? If I'm the odd man out, the obvious and logical solution is to remove myself.

That accounts for 95% of the times I've quit as a player. The other 5% basically amounts to "DM didn't trust me as a player and kept curtailing my freedom and second-guessing my every move."

As a DM, it's a 50/50 split on "I poured too much into this game and the reception was lukewarm at best" and "The players were being too demanding and I was being too spineless to say anything directly, so I made up an excuse to end the campaign."

[zook1shoe]

DM admitted he was tripping on acid, and doing drug deals in the back room

[Libertad]

DM admitted he was tripping on acid, and doing drug deals in the back room

This sounds like the coolest DM ever.

[Keldar]

Sounds like the most selfish to me.

[MeanFightingGuy]

The worst DM I've ever met... well, booya.

A guy who constantly smoked pot during sessions and whose biggest goal in life was to flood the clandestine weed trade in our city with product from the (relatively) nearby Netherlands because he was pissed of with our state's policy regarding soft drugs.
 
And his game was as one could expect it was. It was not that he was actively malicious, but his complete and utter thoughtlessness when it came to DMing, condoned powergaming beyond belief and seemingly didn't know anything else but a goldrush campaign. Bonus points for hentai-like content as a reminder when something is serious business. In short: He was so utterly immature at 23 that he is my go-to anecdotal evidence when I am stating that I'm fairly sure that too much weed during your teens stifles the development of your personality (and since he had somewhat of a temper, he's my counterevidence that weed automatically has to have a calming effect on people).

How went our campaign?
Well, not good. One was a AD&D 2e campaign. At first we were 8-9 players, with little to now checks of how the party was set up. The whole session consisted of nothing but fights that took ages because we had to go through 10 people rolling for 20 and more different beings each round. Characters casually died and were equally casually replaced with replacements of the players choice of equal level and equipment (so death was relatively cheap here).
I can't recall much of the campaign (another testament of his skill as a DM), but I know that at some points we had to go to Sigil, prompting the reaction of one of our players what an unpleasant and nasty place that was and he wished we hadn't go to go there. I wondered "how bad (not: How hard) can the city of the planes be?" Well, it turned out that he took the fact that "any faction is represented here" as "every member of any faction do as they please and behave as they're used to", which amounted to a vivid description of a gathering place in Sigil were super-endowed demons were casually raping women to death in their section and bypassers didn't seem to care whatsoever. Phat lewtz was also handed out casually, including the retarded Deck of Many Cards where some guy drew the imprisonment card, causing a bunch of Mercy Killers to drag him away in chains, sending us another pointless sidequest to get him back. The DMs reaction? "You're so awesome, with the stuff you get into, I don't even need a plot for the game".
Nevertheless I sticked around (stupid idea, I admit), with the number of the players dwindling (among them also some of his pals, which should have been a huge warning sign for me). We went down to a more manageable size of 4-5 regulars, but the quality of the game didn't improve. The DM constantly needled the most good-natured member of the group (not that the others weren't, he was just extremely laid-back), who coincidentally also was the only one with a girlfriend at that time.
He also was having additional sessions of the side with two of the players, and tailored the challenges to the party to the loot he handed out to them during these sessions, with increasingly ridiculous buffs coming in for them. After he buffed one of them between regular sessions by several levels (I think he went up from 9 to 14), made him a Chosen of some goddess of Magic and handed him out artifact-quality loot and the other guy was pampered similarly, pretty much reducing the other players to spectators to their awesomeness, I quit (though I would have quit as well if I had enjoyed the same treatment because a playstyle that went out of hand to such an extent wasn't exactly what I had signed up for).

-------------------------------------

The very same guy also took the cake when it came to DMing a Vampire LARP game. He was co-DM to two other guys, and we were playing as a Camarilla community. I joined as a neonate (I was pretty new at both LARPing and Vampire back then and had little knowledge of the setting, so there was little for me to do back then, and I was willing to stay on the sidelines and gradually get into the game later). I got to play a whopping two sessions.
One reason for this was that we rarely gathered for playing (only once per month) due to the number of players (~15 + 3 DMs). The other was that he caused the completely tanking of the campaign at the second meeting I joined.
To elaborate: While the other two DMs created reasonably powerful (and passive) DM(N)PCs to partake in the setting (two mid-generation Primogens, which made sense), he went all-out and came up with a two thousand year-old Brujah (but he had been in torpor for a thousand years, so it was okay). He also played the role of the Sheriff, since he deemed one of the players, another Brujah, who was interested in the job, as "too irresponsible" if I recall correctly. 
The evening was entertaining (it was about a demon and stuff, I only got a fraction of the references because I joined quite late), until the demon temporarily possessed one of our melee heavy players. The player (in character as a possessed being, and empowered by said possession) got into a fight with the sheriff and finished him off permanently in one round, thereby rendering all the work he put into his precisious Marty Stu to dust in a few seconds. This apparently throw him off the rails, and the evening went downhill from that, quite similar to some Star Trek TOS episode, with an immature brat (don't know which race) with superpowers and a childlike mind having pretended to be the demon the whole time for shits and giggles. Judging from the reaction of the other two DMs, this had not been planned to play out like this. He later made a feeble attempt to apologize, mentioning how he pissed off that his DMPC had died, but if someone can't cope with the loss of a (ready made, not actually leveled), ill written wish-fulfillment character and actively ruins the fun for 17 other people because of it, I guess only the most kind would let that slide.

Needless to say, the campaign was discontinued after that.

[Hades]

I remember the wrost DM I ever had...

He made a lot of favoritims: his favourite players were almost never attacked in a fight, for example. And also, he made weird house rules just to screw with people he didn't like: for instance, if you were a barbarian with over 100 hp, if you took 5 damage, your hand was broken, so you couldn't use a two-handed weapon, and you'd lose 5 hp/round due to "bleeding"... but if you were one of his "bitches" that rule was never applied...

But the wrost thing imho... In an inn we ate posioned food.
We asked the innkeeper "wtf? did you serve poisoned food to us?"
His reply... he pointed at a cartel, on the inn wall, with "The inn declines any responsibility for poisoned food"

WHAT!?!?!